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Industry Moves: Dan Kusnetzky To Join The 451 Group

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The 451 Group has appointed Dan Kusnetzky, 25-year veteran analyst and leader of ZDNet’s Virtually Speaking blog, to head up its research operations. As Vice President, Research Operations, Mr. Kusnetzky will initially accelerate The 451 Group’s cloud computing and virtualization practices, and will direct overall 451 coverage.

Dan Kusnetzky brings The 451 Group more than three decades of industry experience. Before joining the senior team of The 451 Group, Kusnetzky was Principal Analyst at KG LLC. Prior to that, he was Executive Vice President of Corporate and Marketing Strategy for Open-Xchange, a software company that provides open-source collaborative solutions.

Kusnetzky also spent 12 years at International Data Corporation (IDC), four of them as Vice President of System Software Research. During this time, he led an extended team of 16 analysts and created an industry-leading research practice based on both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Prior to that, Kusnetzky spent 16 years with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), where he was responsible for program and product management and marketing in the areas of client software, server software, and clustered and networked systems, and he had the responsibility of being the Intel/UNIX Business Manager.

Veeam Software Introduces New Essentials Bundle, Acceleration Kits for VMware vSphere 4

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Veeam Software, provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today introduced new product bundles designed to pair with VMware vSphere Essentials for small office deployments and with the VMware Acceleration Kits for organizations of all sizes just starting out with virtualization.

The new Veeam Essentials bundle, available for resellers to license alongside VMware Essentials, is ideal for small business or remote/branch office locations. It includes six sockets of:

  • Veeam Backup & Replication
  • Veeam Reporter
  • Veeam Monitor

Additionally, Veeam now offers four editions of the Veeam Acceleration Kit, designed to help organizations of any size getting started with virtualization. These kits are limited to one per customer site.

The Veeam Acceleration Kit Standard includes either six or eight sockets of:

  • Veeam Reporter Enterprise
  • Veeam Configurator
  • Veeam Monitor

The Veeam Acceleration Kit Plus includes either six or eight sockets of:

  • Veeam Backup & Replication
  • Veeam Reporter Enterprise
  • Veeam Configurator
  • Veeam Monitor

At the same time, Veeam introduced a new policy with respect to support for the free edition of VMware ESXi. “As a longtime Premier Technology Alliance Partner and supporter of VMware’s product strategy, Veeam Software takes great pride in creating innovative software products that enhance the customer value of VMware ESX, ESXi, and ESXi Free,” said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam president and CEO. “One such example is support for the free edition of VMware ESXi in Veeam Backup and Replication.

For small or branch office environments, Veeam advises new customers to buy VMware vSphere Essentials and the new Veeam Essentials bundle. This combination costs exactly the same amount of money as purchasing six sockets of Veeam Backup at regular list price for use with free ESXi, and this option includes Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter, for even greater customer value.

The new Veeam bundles are available immediately, with North American pricing beginning at $1,995 for six sockets of Veeam Essentials; $3,150 for six sockets of the Veeam Acceleration Kit Standard; and $4,620 for six sockets of Veeam Acceleration Kit Plus.

ParaScale Comes Out With Cost of Ownership Calculator for Deploying Cloud Storage

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ParaScale, a startup developing cloud storage solutions, today announced availability of a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator to help companies quantify the value and some of the trade-offs that need to be considered when deploying an Internet-scale cloud storage solution. The calculator focuses on the savings associated with the management cost per terabyte, storage utilization and capacity rates. The calculator addresses the questions of many audiences, whether the cloud service provider is an internal IT group, a third-party that delivers storage services, or a combination of both.

The ParaScale Total Cost of Ownership calculator collects input from the user on capacity, growth and capital expenditures and produces a simple to understand report that clearly identifies the five year cost of both solutions. Assumptions of the model are clearly identified including a breakdown on the basis of those assumptions. The results are provided in graphical format with a detailed yearly breakout of capacities, capital and operational expenditures.

ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) is a software only solution that can be downloaded from the web and applied to a standard Linux platform. Legacy servers can be added to a cloud rather than discarded. ParaScale software runs in user space and can therefore be co-resident with other applications. The software will automatically balance capacity utilization and adjust access to address hot spots. ParaScale’s self-managing storage cloud with massive capacity and parallel throughput is an industry first.

You can view the Total Cost of Ownership calculator here: http://www.parascale.com/index.php/tco-calculator.

Release: Raxco’s Virtual Aware PerfectDisk 10 Exchange

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Raxco Software today announced the addition of its patent-pending Virtual Aware defragmentation technology to PerfectDisk 10 Exchange. PerfectDisk 10 Exchange ensures optimal performance in virtual Exchange environments. Licensing also includes a license of PerfectDisk 10 Server Virtual Edition, providing Exchange server systems with a disk defrag solution.

PerfectDisk 10 Exchange utilizes new patent-pending technology that is virtually aware of its environment. Typical disk defragmenters available in the market today are unable to distinguish that they are in a virtual environment, resulting in scenarios where a virtual guest will consume resources from the host that are critical to another guest’s potentially critical activity. This resource contention can easily lead to a severe degradation in performance for the critical guest. With PerfectDisk 10 Exchange, PerfectDisk is able to determine when it is in a virtual Exchange environment and adjust defragmentation accordingly to eliminate performance-debilitating resource contention. PerfectDisk 10 Exchange is the world’s only disk defragmenter to automatically defragment and compact Exchange data stores.

PerfectDisk 10 Exchange with exclusive Virtual Aware defragmentation is available immediately for free evaluation

FastScale Introduces Stack Manager Workgroup Edition

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FastScale today announced the introduction of FastScale Stack Manager Workgroup Edition, a new product that enables enterprise IT and engineering teams to easily create, optimize and manage logical servers for deployment in physical, virtual or cloud environments. Logical servers enable a ‘build once, deploy anywhere’ methodology to support complex, dynamic and hybrid server infrastructure and allow a consistent approach to creating and managing physical and virtual machines throughout server lifecycles. FastScale Stack Manager provides a central platform with a one-button solution for administrators who need dynamic yet optimized server builds.

FastScale Stack Manager incorporates patent-pending Application Blueprinting technology to automatically generate logical servers with ‘just enough operating system’ (JeOS) and deliver lightweight server builds that are up to 95% smaller, inherently more secure, with dramatically reduced memory, processor and disk usage. In addition, new visualization and stack optimization tools enable users to quickly and easily analyze servers with a full operating system profile and then optimize by package group, file type or directory hierarchy with dynamic size calculations that support the assessment.

The result can be compared to the FastScale Application Blueprint as an insurance policy against creating a server build with missing file dependencies – omitted files are easily added with a mouse click. Rich web based settings management allows policy-based standardization as well as fine-grained customization of logical server configurations.

In addition to the most automated, iterative and robust set of capabilities available to build and optimize logical servers for Windows, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based application environments, an enterprise-class software repository enables lifecycle management of logical server specifications, software assets, roles, permissions, history, and metadata for complete tracking, traceability and reproducibility. When a server deployment is needed, FastScale Stack Manager will create the appropriate output format on-demand from components stored in the repository, according to the logical server specification.

FastScale Stack Manager Workgroup Edition is available now, and pricing starts at $25,000 for five users.

Netuitive Brings Predictive Analytics to HP Business Service Management Console

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Netuitive, a provider of self-learning performance management software, today announced it has integrated its predictive analytics capabilities with HP Business Service Management (BSM) technology for an automated and adaptive BSM solution. Netuitive is now a Gold Enterprise Management Application Partner of HP’s and has been invited to join the HP Software Marketplace Referral Program.

Netuitive helps customers increase the value of their existing BSM tools. Business users benefit from increased service availability and avoidance of revenue loss and end-user productivity loss, while IT is better equipped to identify and act upon problems before affecting the end user. Both business and IT users benefit with a unified BSM toolset that enables successful BSM implementations and provides a better understanding of how IT operations and infrastructure performance affect business services.

At a more granular level, the combination of Netuitive’s automated performance management technology and HP’s leading BSM technology addresses common IT operational issues. These include too many fragmented domain tools; the inability to prioritize issues based on business impact; and, slow, inefficient problem identification and resolution processes.